Life :)

Language teaching - Life :) - Romania - Tennis

A great opportunity

November 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

In Romania, anything UK or English language-related is incomplete without a picture of Big Ben. My Romanian–English dictionary has one. My packet of Earl Grey tea has one. Any self-respecting English teaching advert clearly needs to incorporate one. So I found a picture of Big Ben, showing one o’clock as it happens, and added the slogan “Now’s the Time” at the top. Then I wrote some blurb in English that sort of implied that I’ve been teaching for ages. I said I was after intermediate and advanced students (not that I have anything against beginner students; it’s just that they’d probably be better off with a Romanian teacher until I can get my Romanian up to speed). I found a cheap photocopy shop, printed off forty copies with those tear-off strips of paper at the bottom, and started sellotaping them to bits of Timișoara. This morning I was in the middle of putting up an ad (the 25th? 30th?) when my phone rang. It was an older bloke. I asked him what his current level of English was. He said he didn’t speak any English at all. And he wants a lesson tomorrow at 11am. Oh shit! I really will have to wing it tomorrow, won’t I? Actually I’m not thinking ‘oh shit’ at all. I’m thinking this is a wonderful opportunity. A dream come true almost. But yes, teaching somebody English from scratch will be a challenge. It’ll help me improve my Romanian if nothing else. (I know, technically Big Ben is the large bell, not the tower or any of the four clocks.) One concern I do have is about security. Putting ads up everywhere screaming that I’m from the UK does make me a bit of a target. I’m not in Wellington. I’m not in St Ives. I’ll have to be careful.

When I got off the phone this morning I thought, how cool is this? This is fun, this is exciting, and if I could get a few more takers… Man, this is what I dream about. Being my own boss, helping people, roaming around town, getting my lunch from market stalls, and at weekends taking a train to Belgrade or Budapest or Békéscsaba or wherever takes my fancy. Freedom, dammit! Freedom from having to play a role, which is always so exhausting for me. I’m a long way from achieving that freedom, but I might yet manage it. There aren’t many native English speakers in Timișoara, and for the most part they aren’t as crazy as me: they had jobs to go to when they came here. So I might not have a whole lot of competition. One thing’s for sure: I love this city and have no intention of leaving any time soon. I still have some things to sort out with immigration to ensure I don’t have to.

I see that New Zealand has its own version of Donald Trump. He goes by the name of Brian Tamaki. Two years ago he was the subject of an argument I had with my flatmate, who said he was an upstanding citizen who does a lot of good in the community, or something to that effect. I said he should be in jail.

I’ve had one eye on the final of the tennis from London. Andy Murray has just beaten Novak Djokovic in two sets, a well-deserved victory in what was a shoot-out for the year-end number one spot. Yesterday Murray played a remarkable match against Milos Raonic, winning 11-9 in the third-set tie-break. He’s had a fantastic second half of the season, winning Wimbledon and Olympic gold. Murray always impresses me in his interviews with his appreciation for the game and his recall of matches. In a way that shouldn’t impress me – tennis is, like, his job – but some players are pretty hazy when it comes to the finer points. I was supposed to be playing tennis today, not just watching it, but that might have to wait.

A train crash in India has killed 120 people. I read that almost 15,000 people die in Indian train accidents each year.

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

We’re living in seismic times

November 16, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

The upper South Island of New Zealand was rocked by a large earthquake on Sunday night at around midnight. Two people were killed and several more injured. Kaikoura is a mess, and unless you’ve got a boat or a chopper it’s completely isolated, especially if you’re a cow. The quake was felt very strongly in Wellington, where they’re being pummelled by regular aftershocks. I’m glad to be away from it all. Some buildings have been condemned. I think mine is OK apart from some superficial cracks, similar to what we experienced in 2013, but I haven’t heard any confirmation of that.

Today I popped into that “promising” language school, so promising that they hadn’t communicated with me since then, apart from the occasional thumbs-up on Facebook which I only joined because of them. But there’s good news. They want me to run my first “conversation club” on 9th December. The marketing manager phoned me later in the day to invite me over to his flat on the seventh floor of a sixties tower block near the train station. By his own admission the building is an eyesore with barely tolerable noise levels thanks to trains, trams and cars. I met his wife, Simona, and for once I was able to speak a fair bit of Romanian. I probably surprised him with how much of the language I knew. When he corrected me I was grateful. I accepted Simona’s offer of food, expecting a biscuit but getting a meal of meat patties, pickled cabbage and bread. Seriously yum! I’d already had lunch at the market but I didn’t care. Days like today make me feel that it’s all worthwhile.

I’m getting better at picking elections. I spoke to Dad on FaceTime soon after the result became apparent. He called my just-out-of-bed hairstyle presidential (ha!). It had been a long, dark night. I didn’t want Trump to win. In a fellow human being I like to see humility, compassion and respect. He showed virtually none of those qualities throughout the whole campaign. I get why people voted for him. They’d had enough of being neglected by career politicians, people like Hillary Clinton. But they didn’t just get Donald Trump (if it was just him I wouldn’t be that bothered). America is so depressingly partisan now that the vast majority of voters no longer think. They don’t split their ticket; instead they support their team, red or blue, all the way. So by pulling the lever for Trump, they also got the rest of the Republican Party, people who don’t believe in evolution or man-made climate change, people who don’t believe in universal healthcare, paid maternity leave or a minimum wage.

For all the talk of the white working class voting against the so-called elite (and Donald Trump isn’t part of the elite?), and the Democrats neglecting their support base (if you follow British politics, that might sound familiar), one factor played an enormous part in this election and it’s hardly got a mention. Five years ago I wrote that geography would eventually become irrelevant in elections: why do you have to live next door to someone who shares your interests when you can insta-whatsit them online? But in those five years the opposite has happened. People are living closer to like-minded people. For those who lean left, that tends to mean clustering more and more tightly in urban environments. And it’s very electorally inefficient for parties on that side of the political spectrum in countries with FPTP systems, in particular the US. When it comes to the presidency, the Republicans win all the small states which have more electoral votes per capita than the large states. They also win a majority of the states (even when they lose the popular vote as they did this time), and now that most people just vote straight-ticket red or blue, they then pick up a majority in the Senate too. As for the House, well the Republicans, who control most states, can gerrymander the hell out of them because it’s so much easier to draw an advantageous map when your opponents live in such tightly-packed zones. That’s part of why, even though the Democrats have at least as much support as the Republicans, and Clinton will wind up with a near-two-point popular vote margin once all the votes are counted, they’re triply screwed right now. Of course if the US had a 21st-century electoral system instead of an 18th-century one, none of this would matter.

I should point out that I was never a Clinton fan. I was supporting Bernie Sanders during the primaries.

Life :) - Politics - Romania

Mum, and trying to settle in

November 12, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum is in Central Otago on a four-day golfing trip. That gave me the opportunity to talk to Dad last night. Properly. We talked about Trump (good lord!), Brexit (again, agreeing on just about everything even though we voted differently), Leonard Cohen (Dad was quite a big fan), the restoration of Dad’s MGA, the quite magnificent swarm of starlings I saw in town the night before, my challenges here in Romania (there are many), and so on. We talked for an hour and a half and it was great. Most importantly, we talked about Mum. On the train from Deva to Sibiu I received an email from Dad in which he said that life at home was becoming uncomfortable due to Mum’s high stress levels. I replied, including a short paragraph about Mum: “When anything slightly annoying happens, Mum always has to raise the stakes and make the atmosphere unpleasant. It’s all so unnecessary. She’s completely unaware of what she’s doing. Of course if you tell her that, things get very ugly indeed.” Dad read my email out to Mum, omitting that paragraph, but she knew Dad’s password and she read it herself two days later. I phoned them from Sibiu just after she read it and she wouldn’t speak to me. Dad said he forgot to delete the email. I didn’t regret writing what I did, or that she read it, but I still felt sick and didn’t sleep much that night.

I love Mum to bits. That should go without saying. She’s done a heck of a lot for me over the years. But that doesn’t mean she’s perfect. She’s always had a short fuse, and as Dad and I agreed last night, it’s got even shorter of late, to the point where she creates a perpetual state of tension and gloom. If Dad checks the mail and finds a brown envelope, he’s loath to show it to Mum because he knows it’ll set her off. Somebody at the golf club will provoke her one minute, someone at the church group the next, her next-door neighbour the minute after that. They travel overseas a lot but almost anything can go wrong when you’re travelling, and with Mum, the slightest thing can trigger the switch. The episode just before I left where she almost break-danced would have been funny if didn’t reveal that she has a fairly serious problem. And you absolutely can’t talk to her about any of this. Dad can’t. I can’t. Nobody can. In fact it’s very hard to reason with Mum about anything. You might as well reason with Donald Trump (who, thankfully, Mum can’t stand).

Mum is 67. She could easily (and hopefully will) be around for another quarter-century, as her own mother (who had the same short fuse) almost was. She could easily outlive me. We’re in for a lot of screaming and shouting, and perhaps break-dancing, in the meantime.

At times I get down too. Yesterday I walked seven or eight miles trying to find supermarkets where I could put up ads for teaching. I found two, but haven’t had a bite yet. Perhaps I never will. It was a sunny day, I saw some parts of the city I hadn’t seen before, I had a pleșkaviță and two langoși for lunch at Piața 700, so things weren’t too bad. Autumn has been a lovely time of year to see Timișoara. But my confidence is low, I’m struggling to meet people, and at times it feels people are actively trying to avoid having anything to do with me. Learning Romanian has been interesting, in the same way that learning Ancient Greek would be interesting, and so far it’s been about as much use. But I need to keep going, I need to get up early, to walk those eight miles in the sun or the rain or (give it a month) the snow, in the hope that something will happen. It will take time, but I have time. I also want to start writing a book I’d planned to write years and years ago, because I now have time.

I also need to spend less time on the bloody internet. The US election was a huge moment in modern human history, and it’s hard not to read what everybody is saying about it, but gosh all those news sites are a time-waster. Then there’s Facebook. The people at that language school said I should have a page to help me promote my teaching. Not a bad idea, so I set one up, this time in my real name. But I really can’t be arsed with it. I’m interested in engaging with people about 30% of the time and with dozens of people all at once about 0% of the time. I messed around with one or two settings to reduce the creep factor, and I didn’t even provide my email address, instead signing up through my Romanian phone number which is almost a blank slate. I certainly didn’t say which school I went to; why on earth would I suddenly want to connect with my classmates from 20-plus years ago?

I’ll cover the election properly in my next post. Hillary Clinton is currently about 600,000 votes ahead. There are still a couple of million to count but I think she’ll be fine.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Nothing to fear…

November 8, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My room is in a hotel loft. It’s not what you’d call spacious. But it’s miles better than what I experienced with my flatmate in the first half of the year. Coming home from work and sitting in the car for ages until I finally steeled myself to go inside my own home. Lying in bed and seeing every possible hour tick by on my digital clock: the zeros, the ones, the twos, the threes… My living circumstances had an enormous effect on my move to Romania: I’d planned to join Skype groups and really ramp up my Romanian learning but that soon went out the window.

Just when I was getting fed up of having a shaworma every night, I’ve been given access to a kitchen, so I plan to actually cook something tonight. My life will soon become that little bit cheaper and healthier.

People have been saying I shouldn’t worry about the US election, because Donald Trump (or Darth Trump as I’ve been calling him) probably won’t win, and everything will turn out fine even if he does. I’m not sure on either count. On the first, there are about fifteen additional sources of uncertainty this time compared to 2012. And on the second, it doesn’t seem long ago to me that my brother served in the totally unnecessary and terrifying Iraq war, which probably would never have happened if Al Gore had got in. Yes I’m worried, and I’ll be getting up at 2am to watch the results come in on Romanian TV.

The All Blacks lost to Ireland in Chicago, their first loss to Ireland ever. It’s been quite a week for sport in Chicago, what with the Cubs winning. Now I find myself watching handball and volleyball on TV. I like trying to figure out new sports. (Volleyball I have at least some clue about, but handball…)

Did I really just feel an earthquake?! Are they following me?

Update: No it wasn’t an earthquake. They’re pretty rare in this part of the country (but fairly common in the south-east).

This comment for me sums up the US election (except the idiotic part; that’s part of Trump’s shtick):

This election must be so tricky for our US cousins.

On one hand, there is a racist, misogynist, inarticulate, ignorant, homophobic, bullying, sexual abusing, idiotic, populist, inexperienced, hateful fascist.

On the other hand, is an articulate, experienced politician who sent e-mails from the wrong server.

Such a tough one. Dunno how our US friends will know which to choose.

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

My cup of tea

November 5, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve been in Romania almost a month and haven’t had a single cup of tea yet. Well actually that’s not quite true. I’ve had the odd herbal or fruit infusion, with ‘odd’ being the operative word, but not a single cup of NBT: normal bloody tea. But today I was in Auchan, a large French-owned supermarket, and I found a packet of Earl Grey with a picture of Big Ben on the box. Hooray! I haven’t had a cup yet because I haven’t been given access to the kitchen yet, but give it time. (I know, when in Romania and all that, but a cuppa is a fairly basic human need.)

The marketing manager at the “promising” language school asked me what I do in my spare time. I mentioned tennis. He said he played too, and added that he was “really good”. I said that in that case he’d probably thrash me. He then said that he was carrying some excess weight. Then he talked about learning English. “I didn’t learn much because the teachers were poor. I was the best in my class though, and always got ten out of ten of course.” He said Timișoara had much more to offer culturally than either Bucharest or Sibiu, and of course he was born in Timișoara. He described my Romanian as “very poor” before upgrading it to just “poor” on the evidence of about ten words in total. If you multiply his ego by about twenty you get…

Donald Trump. The US election is just four days away, and as I’ve said before, Trump could easily become president. Only it’s even more likely now. FiveThirtyEight are saying he has a 35% chance of victory. The odds and the map are changing all the time as new polls come in, and it feels more relevant to me than on previous occasions because I’ve actually been to America. (It’s 14 months since I was there. Campaigning had already begun. The whole process is a disgraceful waste of time and money.) I see both North Carolina and Florida have flipped from pale blue to pale pink in the last few minutes. Trump is still behind Clinton by about three points in the national polling average, but (1) that gap could close before Tuesday, (2) even if it doesn’t, there could be a modest polling error, and (3) he could conceivably lose the popular vote by a point or more and still win the election; the Electoral College favours him. So in other words, it’s on a knife-edge. I wonder if their estimation of Clinton’s chances – roughly two out of three – is a touch on the high side. If you’re 4-3 up in a set of tennis, you’ll win about two out of three times. (I’m assuming here that you have a 50:50 chance of winning each point whether serving or not – a reasonable assumption for me, but not for, say, a Wellington regional player, and certainly not for the marketing manager of that language school before he put on those extra kilos.) But imagine you’ve been 4-1 up and have lost the last two games. Momentum is against you; the trend is not your friend; your opponent, like Trump, has the wind in his sails. I think that’s the situation Clinton is in.
My cousin, who I met in upstate New York last year, is contemplating leaving the country if (in his words) the idiot wins.

The Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years (!), and even then they almost let it get away. By all accounts Game 7 was one of the great baseball games and the Cubs’ win one of the great moments in baseball (maybe American sport in general, but my knowledge of the other three major American sports verges on non-existent).

The markets in Timișoara are fantastic (I’ll talk about them in another post) but the one in Oradea, near the fortress where I stayed, still wins.

Life :) - Romania

Why am I doing this?

November 4, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Wednesday I went back to the hotel I started off in. I didn’t know whether the manager, the boss, really wanted to see me again. I can’t quite make her out. The rooms here have names, not numbers. She said my room was called something like Dali or Dally and was on the first floor. I found an empty room called Darling (of all things) with the key in its lock, and even saw a map showing no other rooms beginning with D. It must have just been her accent (her mother tongue is Hungarian). I piled my junk into the Darling room and went back downstairs. I was told to be careful with the skylight. Skylight? It turned out there was a Dali room, not far from Darling, but the map only showed a few rooms. (Room numbers are a great idea, aren’t they? Big businesses, especially really unfriendly ones, love to name their rooms. One company I worked for had ghastly names like the Synergy Room. Even after years, people still couldn’t remember that the Synergy Room was the second room past the lift on the fourth floor. If they’d just called it 4B, which is a much nicer name anyway, life would have been easier for everybody.) So I had to swiftly move all my stuff, some of which I’d already unpacked, from Darling to Dali. I certainly couldn’t dally. The Dali room, where I’ll be staying until 2nd December, is bigger than I feared it might be, but doesn’t have the facilities I was promised (I need to ask about that). It does have a TV however.

On Tuesday I visited six language schools in the city. I received a very positive response from the first one. They currently have no native English speakers among their staff, and before they’d even looked at my CV, they wanted me to run conversation classes with their advanced students. I sat down with two of their senior staff for 45 minutes. They want me to promote myself, and to be honest that’s not something that comes easy to me. I also received advice about accommodation in Timișoara. It seems I’m better off using Airbnb instead of renting an apartment where I’d likely face a 25% price hike as soon as I open my mouth. All in all, things sounded promising.

Sometimes, when I’m buttering bread with my penknife or finding somewhere to put the soap so it won’t slide off, I wonder why the hell I’m doing all of this. But then I think I could be in some god-awful meeting in the Synergy Room.

International travel - Life :) - Romania

My new home

October 29, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

There’s definitely been an upswing in my mood since I last wrote. I persisted with the woman at the hotel in Timișoara, and she replied properly, giving me some advice on dodgy Romanian landlords and basically telling me to knock on the door of every language school in the city. She offered me a small room in the hotel for 250 euros a month (just NZ$400) including expenses, and I accepted for one month. I’m going to Timișoara tomorrow but will be staying at another hotel for four nights before moving into what I expect to be little more than a cubby-hole, though I will have a shower, a fridge and basic cooking facilities. So Timișoara will be my new home for the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite city of those I’ve visited – that would be a toss-up between Sibiu and Oradea – but it’s where I was lucky enough to make a connection. Because it was the first place I visited in a country I was very much looking forward to seeing, everything all seemed new and exciting there, a bit like Boston did when I went to America last year. And just like Boston, I spent long enough there to at least sort of get to know it. It’s nothing like Boston though, let’s face it.

Arad, where I’m staying now, isn’t far from my new home and in some ways it’s a smaller version of it. I like it. Today I visited the water tower, partly because of a tip-off I got from someone in Bucharest that it would be interesting and its owner doesn’t speak much English. The water tower was built at the end of the 19th century and hasn’t been operational for 60 years. It now functions as a five-storey museum, showing the history of the city, some artwork and the fire and water services. You can enter the tank at the top through a hole which has been cut out. The owner explained the history of Arad to me and then let me get on with it, but after I came down we had a 15-minute chat in Romanian, my longest yet. If only I could manage that every day. They had a wine festival in one of the main squares. I only had one glass of mulled wine and (for the first time) some sarmale. I’ve been having a few tummy troubles and didn’t want to push it.

Yesterday’s near-three-hour train journey from Oradea, which cost just 18 lei (NZ$7 or £4), was interesting to put it mildly. The guy opposite me had a BO problem and fidgeted constantly. The guy across the aisle drank beer from a 2.5-litre bottle and some clear liquid, which I soon found out to be palinca, from another big plastic bottle. Behind me was a large contingent of gypsies, the equivalent I guess of a whanau. One of them, a girl of five or six, walked up and down the train, saying “Da-mi un leu” or “Give me a leu.” One leu isn’t very much, but it’s the principle I don’t like: a child learns at a young age that you obtain money by begging. The guy with the bottles wanted to talk to me. He didn’t make a lot of sense. I wasn’t sure whether that was a language barrier or a three-sheets-to-the-wind barrier. He offered me some palinca – heaven knows where it had been – and I settled for just a capful. The train stopped at numerous towns, villages, hamlets, rusty signs…

I can bring up maps on my phone, but I struggle to get an idea of scale in a completely unknown place, so last night I dragged my suitcase and carried my other bags more than a mile from the station to the hotel. Tomorrow I’ll get a taxi for the return trip.

One thing Romania is not is boring. It’s raw, it’s unsanitised (not like that), it brims with life. And now it’s my home.

International travel - Life :)

Not long now

September 26, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum’s behaviour on Saturday − rolling around on the floor for 30 seconds, screaming and shouting, and saying that she wanted to die − was a classic case of playing the victim and attention seeking. That was clear when I saw her looking at home furnishings online minutes later. She’s been playing the victim for decades, most often with Dad, but he never calls her out on it. There’s no point reasoning with Mum so I’ve just let time take its course. She’s much better now. Mum is intelligent (if by no means an academic), helpful (in her own way!) and very practical. It’s just a shame her emotional IQ, or EQ if you like, is a couple of standard deviations below the mean.

I don’t enjoy staying at my parents’ place anymore. Our lives are drifting apart; a mansion like this isn’t something I’ll ever have or want. The weather has been awful since I arrived. In Wellington I manage to get out even in the wind and rain, but here there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. My aunt and uncle came over last night for dinner. I get on well with them. Unfortunately the topic of conversation didn’t stray from real estate for the whole time we ate. “How did the Robertsons get seven-twenty for that? It wasn’t even renovated!” Mum said, “If that one on Tancred Street went for 679, how much would we get for this?” I said 680. Even I, with my very limited knowledge of Geraldine house prices, know it would go for at least $800,000.

Packing, which two days ago was finished, has now become unfinished. Mum has bought me some winter clothes and it would hurt her feelings if I didn’t include them. The weight limit doesn’t allow me to take both her stuff and mine. I’m unable to fully leave her behind.

My flight leaves Christchurch at 4:55pm tomorrow. I’m flying with Emirates. My first plane, a 777, makes short stops at Sydney and Bangkok on the way to Dubai. From there I’ll be taking one of Emirates’ extensive fleet of A380s to Heathrow.

I got an email from the marimba teacher asking me how I’m getting on. I’ve missed that a lot − it was the highlight of my week while I had a flatmate. I see the Red Sox have won their last eleven games and have almost wrapped up their division. Won’t it be great to write about travel, language, music, baseball and things that I actually care about? I hope I’ll get the chance. Not long now.

Life :) - Tennis

Falling out

September 24, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve managed to fall out with Mum. This isn’t the first time this has happened, or the 21st, but none of the other occasions involved her rolling around on the floor screaming and saying she wanted to die. There’d be no point in suggesting that she visits the doctor, which is probably what she needs. Minutes after dragging herself up from the floor she was browsing curtains on the UK-based John Lewis website. I’m no expert on these things, but that would seem to suggest that she wants to live. This all happened five hours ago and she still won’t talk to me. The easiest thing would be for me to apologise, but I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. Mum flies off the handle and ratchets up the stakes at the slightest thing, causing a lot of unnecessary stress for everyone. Today I called her out on that,  not that she paid any attention to what I said of course. She was just deeply offended and that was that (as always; you can never have a reasoned argument with Mum). This is awful timing when I’m about to go away.

One side benefit of our falling-out is that my bags are now fully packed. I thought I might not be welcome here anymore. I’d rather spend the next three nights in Christchurch than here in Geraldine, even with the added expense, because there’d be far more to do, but I expect I’ll be staying here after all.

I played tennis last Saturday for the last time in a long time, against the guy I was extremely lucky to beat last month. No such luck this time. He played a blinder. Everything he touched turned to gold. I played far better than last time too, but after losing four games out of five to concede the first set 6-4 I was out of ideas. My losing run extended to eight games from nine in the second set, and the glimmer of hope I got from winning the next two games was quickly snuffed out as I lost the set 6-2 and the match in an hour. It was a damn good hour of exercise though.

Timișoara has been named European Capital of Culture for 2021. It’s the same award that was bestowed on Sibiu in 2007, and hopefully it will have the same effect. Fantastic news for the first Romanian city I’ll get to visit (in just 13 days!).

Life :) - My big plan

Pretty vacant

September 16, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I still haven’t got anyone to rent out my flat, and time is getting pretty damn short for me. It wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed my property manager had changed the ad to say it had two bedrooms rather than three without telling me. I told her what I thought of that. She’d received some feedback that one of the rooms was too small. And anyway, as I realised yesterday, the advert was crap. Really, really crap. That’s why thousands of people were looking at the ad but not liking what they saw. The lead photos were of the outside of the apartment, the interior photos gave no sense of spaciousness, the major selling points were omitted from the blurb or relegated to near the bottom, and if a student of English had written it, it would have been dripping with red ink by the time I’d finished with it. On that last point, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I never said anything. I completely rewrote the ad for my manager; it now includes the dimensions of the bedrooms so nobody can have any complaints. I asked her to take some more photos. And perhaps most importantly I dropped the rent by $25 a week. The good news is that someone who viewed the flat almost a month ago has expressed interest now that the rent has been lowered.

On Sunday I played a singles match. So much spin of all varieties to contend with. I won the first set 6-2 − a slightly flattering score; it was really a case of me winning the important points. But I really struggled after that, losing the last two sets 6-1, 6-2. At one stage I lost nine games in a row; at least from 5-0 down in the final set I salvaged two games and some respectability. The whole match was done and dusted in 65 minutes. The main positive I took from the loss was that I had no trouble getting to the ball − I’ve got my energy levels back. It was what happened after I got to the ball that was the problem. I thought I’d done tennis for the foreseeable future but I now have to play one final match on Saturday, a rematch against the guy I recently beat from match point down.

On Monday my student and his wife made dinner for both me and his wife’s tutor who comes from America. After soup to start, the main dish was big on seafood including squid. The American tutor (who will still be teaching my student’s wife) has a much stronger bond with her student than I had with mine, and helps her with many things that aren’t directly language-related. It was great that they invited us over for what I gather was typical food from their part of Myanmar minus most of the spiciness.

On Tuesday I attended a quiz, mainly just to say goodbye to some people.

My dad arrives tomorrow.